Thursday, May 03, 2007

parking, jesus.

When I was a very small boy, very small boys came and drank with me. On several youthful Thursdays, before the G rescued me to a world away from the Clarendon Metro stop, I could be found sitting outside the Dupont Front Page with an entire bucket of Coronas sweating in my lap. After I had consumed several of these, I would retire down to the bathroom and wait in line to do what it is that people do when they retire to a stank bathroom.

On one such occasion, while washing my hands, a young man burst in, saw all the toilets were occupied, huffed and did the desperate pee-pee dance. Frustrated by the lack of free urinals, he quickly loosened his ribbon belt and chino dress pant and relieved himself into the begrimed floor drain.

I have never returned.

In the proceeding years, the bar’s proprietors discovered that they owned more framed copies of the New York Posts than they had wall space for and they opened another location in Ballston. I don’t know why I didn’t make the connection that the two were related but last night I was tricked into going to the one in Arlington.

The cover band played "Undone" and clearly no one there knew it. Same with Rusted Root. Come on, anybody? "Cat Turned Blue?" I felt old. Especially when I saw some kids I was an RA for. But then I calculated that even they were too old to be there so I just felt bad for them. Their baseball caps were very white.

Like its sister bar, the bathrooms are not adequate for the Miller Lite-filled masses. But in Virginia, no one pees on the floor.